The Shedding Effect: Don’t Let It Scare You!

The shedding effect has a terrible name—and for good reason. Shedding means losing or falling out, and in this case it refers to hair loss that can occur when starting an oral medication for alopecia.

It does not happen in every case, but when it does, it can cause great concern among patients. So much so that some decide to stop the treatment—just before the benefits begin! To help avoid that situation, we are going to explain what the shedding effect is.

What it is?

We call the shedding effect a sudden increase in hair loss shortly after starting an oral treatment for alopecia. It may seem contradictory, but it is something that happens quite frequently. It is always reversible and, in fact, it indicates that the treatment is working.

Why does it happens?

To explain why this hair loss occurs, we must first understand what we are trying to achieve when prescribing an oral medication for alopecia. As we know, where there is no hair follicle, medication cannot regenerate it; we can only resort to a hair transplant.

However, there are areas where the hair appears thin, sparse and with a large distance between follicles. This happens because the hair is miniaturised, meaning there are many more hairs in the shedding phase than there should be. This situation can be reversed with medication and hair medicine treatments.

Oral medications such as minoxidil or finasteride help these hairs move from the shedding phase into the growth phase. However, hairs that are already in the growth phase also enter the resting phase before growing again. For this reason, during the first few months it may seem as though the hair you already had is falling out. This is the shedding effect: hair falls out simply because it is entering the shedding phase before growing again.

The shedding effect: when does it end?

The good news is that the shedding effect always comes to an end. It is not possible for the medication to make you lose more hair than you originally had. The only question is how long it will take to stop, and that depends on each patient’s hair growth cycle.

Generally speaking, it does not usually last longer than four months. In other words, it is normal not to see the results of an alopecia treatment until the fifth month. This is always a good sign: the treatment is working.

For this reason, it is important to always seek advice from a trichologist, who can determine whether hair loss after taking finasteride or minoxidil is normal or not. A good specialist knows how to distinguish shedding caused by this process from abnormal hair loss.

Dr. Espinosa Custodio works at Instituto Médico del Prado, his hair clinic in Madrid, and performs hair transplants in Mexico, twice a year. If you would like to make an appointment, you can contact us on +34 912 468 664, on WhatsApp +34 627 396 322 or on the contact page of our website. From Mexico you can contact us at +52 55 4590 9909.